Google Maps for all locations on Photo Dharma and new Search Facilities

Posted by Anandajoti on Sunday, 1st April, 2012

For some time I have had google maps of some of the locations on my Photo Dharma website. But I have now mapped nearly all the locations on the main pages: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar & Thailand, with comprehensive coverage, so that any group of photographs can easily be found on a map.

Hopefully that will make finding the site where the photographs have been taken that much easier, and hopefully also encourage people to visit some of the places where these cultural and historical sites are found.

One problem I noticed with google maps is that they are slow to load, having to make many calls to an outside server, and very much slowing down page loads. So now they are now available only on demand and come up in a Lytebox overlay. Once opened there are hyperlinks in the descriptions, which then open in a new tab.

I might mention that finding all these locations [1] was a very difficult process given my slow connection here, and the fact that some of the photographs were taken years ago in places I have forgotten how to get to, if I ever knew at all. Perhaps one-third of them do not seem to have been mapped before, or were wrongly mapped, so that didn’t help either.

I have also included a comprehensive map for the whole site which is available from the Home Page, and which shows the entire coverage for the photographs on the website.

This has been prepared, of course, to help people find their way around the website which is now quite large with over 5,500 photographs in around 140 albums.

Another facility I have just added in to help with this is new google custom search engine facilities, which will turn up any keyword it finds in a new search page, and give links back to the albums concerned.

Here are a few screen shots showing the new facilities – but the best thing is to go to the site and use them yourselves – and please let me have your feedback.